Alison Nguyen United States, b. 1986

Alison Nguyen (b.1986, United States) is a New York-based artist working across video, installation, sculpture, and performance. She received her M.F.A in Visual Art from Columbia University and her B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University. Alison Nguyen’s practice combines the particulars of the personal with an exploration into broader forces of history, particularly those entwined with technology. Nguyen’s installations and sculptures are material counterparts to her moving image work which conflate distinctions between the virtual and the real.

Collage and the readymade are recurring techniques in her work. In her critically acclaimed body of work surrounding a computer-generated woman Andra8, Nguyen enlisted motion-capture technology to create a live-broadcast of her avatar, Andra8. Based on th artist's likeness, Andra8 is a virtual worker that conducts menial tasks common in the gig economy by taking on multiple roles as an assistant, fitness guru, and influencer. In an increasingly globalized and capitalisitc world, the rise of tech companies have engendered labor distribution problems. Andra8 highlights the contemporary embodiment of a colonial process of outsourcing numbing labor to countries in Latin America, Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. 

Andra8's speech is based off of a learning program Alison Nguyen and programmer Achim Koh developed in 2019. The program, ‘Andra8.says,’ uses training data collected from the posts of ‘B-list’ social media influencers (individuals with 10,000 to 1 million followers) to generate new text passages. The resulting text is eerily similar to influencer rhetoric, emphasizing how social media algorithms promote “preferred” content that revolve around diversity, inclusion, health, and technology, excluding concepts that might be considered uncomfortable for users.

Nguyen is a 2023-2024 Studio Artist at the Whitney Independent Study Program (New York, NY). Her most recent solo exhibition was presented in 2023 at MIT List Center for Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA). In December 2023, her first institutional solo screening, “history as hypnosis” was presented at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.